Whether true or apocryphal, the story goes that a famous Russian general named Grigory Potemkin erected fake settlements along Empress Catherine the Great’s route to the Crimea for the purpose of deceiving and impressing her when she visited the region in 1787. Down through the years, the phrase “Potemkin village” has come to mean an appearance designed to deceive—a façade behind which there is no reality. It is also a perfect metaphor for another deception—what Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, terms “animal magnetism.”
The very antithesis of Christian Science, animal magnetism is the spurious belief that there is life, substance, and intelligence in matter. Animal magnetism is the essence of evil, “the awful deception and unreality of existence,” Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 207). It is this belief that underlies every manifestation of sin, disease, and death. And its destruction, as Mrs. Eddy makes clear in Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science, comes by exposing its deceitful nature and stripping away its pretense of reality. “Expose and denounce the claims of evil and disease in all their forms,” she writes, “but realize no reality in them” (p. 447). When the mask is removed and the illusion pointed out, the result is Christian healing.
The fundamental fact concerning animal magnetism is that, like Potemkin’s “village,” it has no reality but is only illusion. Animal magnetism is a name for something that does not exist except in mortal belief. It is the fallacious proposition that Spirit and matter are both real and hold joint jurisdiction over man. It has no life or intelligence but, like all lies, is merely the hypothetical opposite of truth. And like all lies, its assertiveness, by prompting the utterance of truth, induces its own self-destruction.
